Wednesday, 6 January 2010

Oh, I do love a good Prisoner's Dilemma game

Cattalaxy comments on this Telegraph piece by Delingpole, which says that a whistleblower under US law can claim a proportion of the total government funds that were misused. All the folks at the Earth System Science Center at Penn have apparently been emailed a note reminding them of the provisions of the legislation and inviting them to rat out their friends.

I'd put odds close to zero that this results in anything: I doubt that any court under the current administration would push anything or would deem any government funds to have been misused, and so the off-diagonals aren't all that lucrative in expected value terms.

I'd also expect the expected payouts to have to be pretty high: surely any one of them could have received several million from the oil companies by defecting earlier on. So if it's a PD game, it's one that's been going on for rather some time now.

3 comments:

I see the discussion on Catallaxy has descended into bits of science randomly thrown about in the hope of expanding the debate.

There's a few interesting procedural hurdles for them to get over. I just found this, which is awesome, and shows up the complexities. Some work to be done.

I liked the idea you posted earlier that it has to be a whistleblower, rather than a hacker, because that legitimises the act of leaking by merit of the morality of the action. Theft would be to prove a point, but a whistleblower would point to a morality call. And now we can appeal to the wallet rather than the brain or the conscience to look for a further whistleblower.

I agree, I think that if it was going to happen then it would have happened by now... although I can imagine a few scenarios where you're stuck in the game indefinitely, depending on how complex the interactions are.

"I'd also expect the expected payouts to have to be pretty high: surely any one of them could have received several million from the oil companies by defecting earlier on. So if it's a PD game, it's one that's been going on for rather some time now."

Thats a zero likelihood of happening. I mean the oil companies paying them off. Many oil companies invest heavily in green technology and also think that attempts by them to squew the research will only get the honest anti-agw research thrown out with the tainted.